In praise of Boris - well, sort of

Johnson should probably never have been PM, but the Privileges Committee lacked measure and mitigation

Johnson discusses the pandemic over sandwiches in Number Ten.

This is not a popular view I realise, but I couldn't help feeling a certain twinge of sympathy for Boris Johnson following his auto-defenestration from parliament. Yes, he was lazy, libidinous, often contemptuous of the rules and had a rather distant relationship to the truth. But I've seen a lot of politicians and prime ministers up close over the last thirty years and if every chancer were to have been denied office, there'd have been precious few who ever made it. Many of his supposed psychological defects are practically a job requirement.

And whatever my views about his politics, I am acutely uneasy about seeing a politician elected to office by many millions of voters being taken down by trivial infractions of ill-conceived lockdown rules which were being breached up and down the land. I mean, who of us didn't? Johnson had the mitigating circumstance that his home was also his place of work, where it was always accepted that social distancing rules did not have to be observed to the letter.

Reading the Privileges Committee report I couldn't being reminded of what a BBC manager once told me: if you want to get rid of someone ask to see their expense accounts – they never stack up.

There was at the very least a lack of proportionality here. Tony Blair took us into a disastrous war on a false prospectus and never had to resign or be suspended from parliament. Boris Johnson attended a birthday party at which he didn’t even eat the cake.

You might find it surprising that I am devoting space to a prime minister who never should have been in Number Ten in the first place. But there are some important issues here lost in the pearl clutching and we shouldn't allow fear of Twitter to prevent us examining them. Anyway, you don't expect me to take the obvious line, do you, so read on...